leaving work in the pitch dark and fucking up my internal clock a couple weeks a couple times a year just cause people cant manage daylight on their own schedule

FUCK DST

I love DST here. The level of light in the morning is no worse than winter time (at its worst), and I get an hour more daylight for gardening when I get home from work (useless at this time of year where hayfever rules the open air but that only lasts a few months).

It must suck to take 2 weeks for your bodyclock to come good. You'd be screwed if you crossed into a different timezone! Try taking melatonin before your adjusted bedtime for a few nights when the times shift. I've heard getting drunk is useful for resetting body clocks too, but I can't speak from experience on that one.

Yeah wtf. The standard rule of thumb is it takes 1 day to adjust per hour difference in time zone. Less if you're younger. In my experience that seems to be about right too... seems to take me a week to ~fully~ feel adjusted when I fly between eastern Australia and the midwest of the US (which is a 7, 8 or 9 hour difference, depending on the time of year).

You can't switch to self-feeding when a cat is an adult, but if you start when they're a kitten, and they grow up never having the experience of being hungry, they won't overeat. They'll nibble just what they need throughout the day. And they leave you alone instead of begging for food. (They might still wake you up because they're bored, but that's a separate problem).

As someone with a diagnosed circadian rhythm disorder, allow me to say fuck you. Now, my particular disorder isn't particularly affected by the time change, though it would be in my best interest to have bright sunlight when I get up in the morning which DST messes with during the spring and fall.

Going for weeks on end on 3 hours of sleep per night is bad enough, add in a real circadian rhythm disorder which is basically your body screaming at the top it's metaphorical lungs that 5AM to 1PM is the appropriate time to sleep (and, incidentally, 10PM to 5AM is the perfect time to be awake and alert) and you'll soon find out that real sleep deprecation isn't an annoyance, it's physically and mentally painful, not to mention physiologically damaging. Until you've gone through it you can just shut the hell up.

It highly depends what country you're in; One of the things that prolongs the adjustment to daylight savings time is the lack of sun. The body is made to wake at dawn. As a result people who live in countries such as Norway (minimal amount of daylight during the winter) have a harder time adjusting.

I doesn't take me 2 weeks to adjust, but it *does* take my kids and my pets at least 2 weeks to adjust. Therefore, my life is disrupted while they get their internal clocks back in sync.
For instance, my dog is now religiously barking to go out at 6am, which was fine a week ago when it was actually 7am. So much for the extra hour in the morning. My kids complain that they aren't tired at 9pm, 'cause their internal clocks say its 10pm and they've got their second wind. I can't put them to bed at 8pm and ign

If we are free to adjust our standard working time as necessary, then why not just get rid of time zones all together. Just use UTC and everybody get used to the idea of going to work at 10PM and getting home at 7AM if that's the side of the planet you live on and you want to work during daylight.

Just use UTC and everybody get used to the idea of going to work at 10PM and getting home at 7AM if that's the side of the planet you live on and you want to work during daylight.

If you are going to go that far, ditch "AM" and "PM" and put yourself on 2400 time. When your enumeration of time is no longer tied to the physical manifestation of day and night, ante and post meridian have no meaning.

Personally, I'd be fore ditching time zones, as it makes inter-zone business a lot easier. Never again would you have to pipe up to remind your boss' boss' boss (and all of his peers on the line) that his proposed, weekly 8 AM teleconference (New York time) means you have to be at the office at 5 AM (California time). Instead, HR can just gloss over it with company-wide policies like "inter-deptartment meetings will be scheduled between common time 16 (PST 8 AM) and 22 (EST 5 PM)."

It would also make international business easier, since it's immediately clear from email time stamps, hours of business on web sites, etc. when a supplier, customer, or branch is open. Unfortunately, these sort of things are all rare enough -- either rare events in an average person's life, or common in the lives of relatively rare people -- that most people don't see a huge benefit.

I'd be in favor of keeping some version of the 12 hour AM/PM designation, just because it could help disguise dateline issues that arise with the new system. (That is, the fact that a group of people all have to go into work after sun-up "late" Tuesday and comes home before sundown "early" Wednesday.)

As for DST itself, there's really no point to it. If you work according to the sun, you go to work whenever it's up, regardless of time. If you don't, you don't really care when the sun is up, because virtually no office, shop, or business depends on natural light anymore. Ever since artificial lighting became the norm, the scheme only "benefits" people of the latter group who support the former group, such as banks. And we all know banks strive to maximize their availability to customers, right? Right?

The savings from coordination are completely lost when you factor in the cost of adjusting everyone to a new time. Hotels, airports, and such are especially affected. Then there's the fact that in some regions you actually want people working when it's darker, because air conditioning costs much more to run than lights. Abolish the system and never worry about it again.

I hear this a lot from people who think they're much cleverer than they really are.

You're right, without time zones, you wouldn't need to remind your boss that 8 AM eastern is 5 AM pacific. Instead, you'd have to remind him that 13 o'clock global time is too early.

"How early?" he'll ask."About an hour and a half before I usually get up," you reply."Well, is that because you sleep in, or because it's really too early?""It's really too early. Before the sun has even risen, most of the time.""How much before?"...and on and on.

Time zones make it easy to communicate these concepts. 3 AM has the same meaning to everyone everywhere, and is much more precise than "a bit after the middle of the night".

And sure, you can send out company wide emails saying meetings must be between 16 and 22 global time, but how does that make things any easier? Any company big enough to span multiple time zones is pretty much required to have some sort of calendar service managing the scheduling of meetings. Just program in a policy that checks any meeting entry to ensure local time for all participants is between 7 AM and 8 PM. I'd be surprised if there are any multinational corporations not already doing this.

The only people who would benefit from eliminating time zones are exceptionally lazy programmers.

If you're going to go that far, ditch 24 hours and go metric: 100 hours per day, etc. Minutes and degrees of longitude are a holdover from the ancient Egyptians who used base 60 numbers.
If you're going to do that, we need to make degrees and radians metric as well. Also, we might as well go ahead and slow down the revolutions of the earth so that there are only 100 per trip around the sun instead of 365.25 +/- iota. I would say speed it up to 1000 revolutions per year, but I actually need my days to be longer, not shorter. Our workload at my company requires the day to have at least 36 hours in it, so if the day was about 3 times longer, that would still allow some time to sleep as well.

Because the definition of Noon, 12:00, is when the sun is at its highest point.

Ah! So tradition, then. Fair enough. (Just an FYI, The sun is almost never at its highest point at noon. For that to happen, you have to be right on the "prototype" meridian for your time zone for the five months of the year that we are on Standard time.

Regarding the time of day, I understand the choice of 12 falling at the solar transit rather than at average sunrise. Noon is close enough to the same time each day to serve as a constant, whereas sunrise and sunset vary greatly. If you're setting a clock based on a shadow and a stick, it makes sense to start counting from zero at that point instead of starting the count using 6 as a halfway point.

I like the idea of using a 24 hour clock, as it removes a needless ambiguity. As digital clocks become more

I'm employed by a railway, and have to accommodate 2 time zones every day. The town is located in the mountain time zone and so uses MT. The trains however come from the west in Pacific Time, head north to the main line, then go back west to the coast. In order to keep it simple, they just run Pacific Time.

I leave for work using the clock on the stove. I leave at about 6:50 AM and arrive for work at 6:00 AM. At the end of the day, I leave work at 3:00 PM and get home at about 4:10 PM.

Just today we had a safety meeting that was scheduled in a conference room at a local hotel. Invites were sent out using "Town Time", but this wasn't stated in the email. Everyone in my department showed up an hour late. One of the old guys was vocal... that was awesome.

Since I have had this job, I have become a time change HATER. I like the DST right now because the sun is just coming up when I am starting my day of work, but I hate the change. It just makes my life more complicated than it needs to be.

That sounds like a piece of cake. I've worked with people from Moscow, west to Alaska. Different timezones change at different times.. People don't necessarily pay attention to when other timezones change.

I threw together a timezone page, so anyone can see what time it is anywhere right now. It just reads through/usr/share/zoneinfo, and recalculates "now" to every timezone that has a file. It then sorts them by

I like time to be a standard, historically the sun moon combination had benefits. DLST is not standard. Different parts of the world observe it on different dates and for different amounts of time. So we are kind of screwed because even if we did change other places won't for whatever reasons. The US isn't even consistent within itself. Using standard time just make a nice standard, and if your company wants to deviate, it can have summer hours and winter hours like my old company did. For me it really does

When Western Australia didn't have daylight saving I worked at a company with summer hours, which turned out to be pretty nice, getting off work when everything was still open and there was plenty of day left. The next year they introduced daylight saving, but kept the summer hours. Damn those were some early starts...

Probably move to Arizona when I retire. I really like it here in Colorado but DST sucks. As What annoys me... [slashdot.org] says, even if you don't have it, you still have to adjust for it. I figure retired and living where it's not observed, I can almost pretend it doesn't exist.

Be prepared to be confused by your TV Guide half of the year. And remember, certain parts of Arizona do observe, so be careful about driving near or through certain reservations when it comes time to change your clock, or you'll drive into a slidecage and be unable to return home.

Agreed. Even with DST being observed in summer, it STILL gets light at some stupid hour in the morning if you live at a latitude higher than around 30 degrees (which is half of Australia, and almost all of the USA). Not being a morning person myself, I am quite happy for it to be dark for that extra hour in the morning, just so I can actually an hour or two of usable light in the evening when I get home.

Having said that, as someone that works in IT, I have a natural love for standardisation and a hate of ha

Agreed. Even with DST being observed in summer, it STILL gets light at some stupid hour in the morning if you live at a latitude higher than around 30 degrees (which is half of Australia, and almost all of the USA). Not being a morning person myself, I am quite happy for it to be dark for that extra hour in the morning, just so I can actually an hour or two of usable light in the evening when I get home.

Having said that, as someone that works in IT, I have a natural love for standardisation and a hate of hacks. And yes, DST is a hack. So the rational side of me doesn't like the concept.:)

Me too, but DST is the best hack we have. No amount of coding is going to change the tilt of the earth.

We could always just start work an hour earlier, and school an hour earlier, but then not only do you need to know the timezone of the business you are calling, you need to know if they observe a 1 hour shift to opening/closing time. DST just seems easier.

We could always just start work an hour earlier, and school an hour earlier, but then not only do you need to know the timezone of the business you are calling, you need to know if they observe a 1 hour shift to opening/closing time. DST just seems easier.

Things you would have to take into consideration, under different systems:

Changing business opening times with the season:* Opening hours* Relative timezones

I am from Indiana...went to grad school there too...Indiana was a Standard Time stalwart for *decades*

Why? It is simple stubbornness. The idea that 'they' can tell 'us' what time it is...well that is just too much for some people. What kind of people? People who instinctively base their reactions on how others around them are reacting...

It's great for sheep...not so good in a modern competitive economy...maybe that explains some other things as well...

So what you're saying is that Daylight Savings Time is for those people who would dislike setting their alarm to go off an hour earlier (for example 6 am instead of 7 am), but who don't mind setting the time on their clock one hour forward and then getting up at the "same" time, 7 am as before. In other words, stupid idiots, which you confirm to be the vast majority of people in the US.

OK, thanks for clearing that up for me.

As for people not having flexible schedules: why can't states just say "OK, from thi

As for people not having flexible schedules: why can't states just say "OK, from this date till this date, schools start one hour earlier and we suggest all employers shift their employee schedules by one hour"? Why do we have to mess with our watches to create a fake time? If you want people to work earlier to make better use of daylight, fine, just tell everybody to work one hour earlier.

So... instead of looking up the current timezone of the place you are calling, which is already a solved problem, you now have to know if they observe a 1 hour shift at that particular workplace?

And overtime/shift work rules have changed.

And schedules that previous worked great (school starts when work starts, shift work changeover for parents working different jobs, etc) is all mucked up.

And everyone has to replace their opening/closing hours in anything they've printed (on their door, fridge magnets, etc)

There's getting up earlier, and then there's getting up earlier. Without DST the sun would be up and shining away at 3:30 or 4am in the mid-latitudes in summer. I don't think even early risers want to get up at those kind of times.

I like DST--but not to the absurd lengths it's been pushed to in the US. It starts too early and end much, much too late, resulting in, as other people have mentioned, almost everybody having to get up in pitch black for some portion of the year. I'd like to see it start in April and end in August or early September.

I'll agree with you there (I'm the person you're replying to). I should point out that I'm Australian and we have DST for slightly under half the year here. I do know that in the United States you now have DST for 2/3rds of the whole year (which makes 'standard' time not very standard!), which I agree is getting a bit ridiculous:)

I'm a southerner but I fully agree with you - DST makes little sense in the lower latitudes (so perfectly logical that Qld/NT and to some extent WA don't have it). Remember though that the further you go poleward in summer (from the tropics of Capricorn or Cancer), the longer the days get. DST starts making sense in the mid-latitudes, such as most of the United States, since otherwise it'd be light at 3 in the morning.

Australia is a bit of a tossup. Most of the population (i.e. everyone bar Tasmania) lives

I like DST--but not to the absurd lengths it's been pushed to in the US. It starts too early and end much, much too late, resulting in, as other people have mentioned, almost everybody having to get up in pitch black for some portion of the year. I'd like to see it start in April and end in August or early September.

I don't get that, personally - I get up in the mornings so I can drive to work and sit in a windowless building all day.

What's worse for me, since I don't get off work until well after 6PM most days, is getting absolutely zero daylight hours after work, let alone in the morning.

4 months of not seeing the sun really makes you feel like you're living in a horror movie.

No it doesn't save you any daylight. You have the exact same amount of daylight in a day regardless of how you set your clock, because the clock affects neither the sun nor the rotation of the earth. People who generally wake up an hour or more after sunrise will get more sunlight through DST but they could achieve this simply by getting up earlier.

Your unwillingness to get up earlier and enjoy the morning does not motivate me to disrupt my schedule and go to work in the dark during summer. If you are missing out on daylight by sleeping though it in the morning, try going to bed earlier and getting up for a barbeque breakfast with friends and family, or do your exercise in the morning instead of after work. You might be surprised what a good start to the day it is.

OTOH, your unwillingness to vary your schedule doesn't motivate me to get up earlier (although I do anyway, because of DST).

As long as the issue has been put to a vote by the masses and not thrust upon you by a government that doesn't listen, then please stop crying about it. And if it been thrust upon you by a government without support from the people, then go crying to _them_ about it, because you won't convince people who already think it's a good idea and you'll bore the people who already agree with y

The time of sunrise and sunset does change through out the year based on distance from the equator. relations between people to each other, and to work, and to everything essentially, is easier when you adjust for it so that you "always wake up around 6am". the flipside is, it'd be a real pain in the ass to make a correction for EVERY day's change.

Hence DST is a compromise of both sides of the coin. One large correction twice a eyar (once forwards, once backwards).

28 hours isn't perfect for me, but is very close, and it's easier to stretch your cycle by a small amount than to compress it. When I first moved to Finland they were just beginning one of their longest winters on record, and without any regular light or temperature clues, I fell into a 28-hour cycle very easily that lasted many months.

I heard of a woman in Queensland who complained on the radio that DST faded her curtains quicker. Everyone laughed, but if she opened and closed them at the same time each day, then she was right. For a given value of right....

In the hotter climates, people close the curtains in the afternoon to prevent the hot sun coming into the house, then open them after sundown for the evening and early morning.So any change which alters the relative proportion of sun against closed curtains vs open curtains will indeed add 1hr of sun exposure per day to the curtains.By 'the same time every day', most country folk will mean their habits remain constant.

Similarly, cows produced less milk in day light savings - not because cows know about day light savings, but because they didn't. The trucks turned up earlier, the cows milked at the same time... less milk.

But the real critical issue in Queensland as far as I'm concerned, is the 15+ UV rating at 10-2pm, which then extends to school exit times during day light savings.

DLS is designed for areas close to the polar circles, not areas close to the tropics.

I am fine with gaining an hour. Losing an hour sucks. So I think instead of moving clocks forward an hour in the spring, we should just move them back 23 hours. The end result is the same time, and you have an extra day on the weekend.

In the UK there is DST as well but there have been some rumblings to introduce Single Double Summer Time (SDST) [timeanddate.com] (yes, it's a stupid name). This would shift the entire time to be GMT+2 though all the year. It would deprive people in the north of Scotland of a few hours of daylight in the morning, which seems to be the main opposition. For the rest of us it would mean fewer traffic accidents. But ho hum, as long as the farmers are happy.

We get more sunlight in summer.No back off, we get more PERCEIVED sunlight in summer.

It's a good thing a very good thing - as someone who suffers with SAD (oh boy) the "extra" sunlight is just fantastic. Summer is a warm, happy time - with lots of light, time to get home from work and still DO THINGS.

It blows my mind people swear black and blue about DST, it's mind boggingly backwards. It's certainly a quirky fix but you're not going to see us changing peoples lives to be 'work at 7, finish at 3' are you? It's never going to happen.Winter is depressing and awful, to be honest - I'd prefer 2 hours of DST all year round. Yes, all year round. I realise it's stupid and we should just do things earlier but we won't do things earlier - it's not going to happen. DST 2 hours earlier - while also extremely unlikely is at least a pipe dream I can wish for.

Winter, leave just before sun up, leave work just after sun down. I'd much rather leave for work well well before sun up, leave work while sun remains up.I spent a couple of days in Paris in their summer 2010 and it was glorious. The sun was still out at if I recall, 9:30pm - it was amazing and brilliant.

If anything, summer we need the 'extra hour' less than we actually need it in winter -we should be 2 hours forward in winter and only 1 hour forward in summer - it's backwards as it currently is.(From a state in Aus which follows DST - thank god! I absoloutely love it)

I absolutely hate it. In the desert it is too fucking hot to spend time outside in the afternoon/evening during the summer. The morning is wonderful, nice warm sun but it hasn't gotten too hot yet. I would love to spend hours outside every summer morning exercising, tending the garden and just hanging out, but I have to be at work at a fixed time and some bastards thought it was a good idea to steal an hour of wonderful morning, so they can give me an extra hour of dreadful scorching evening. And since the sun sets latter I have to waste more energy getting the house down to a reasonable temperature before bedtime. This is one of the few things that Arizona got right, I wish the rest of the southern states would figure it out as well.

You get up when the sun is up and sleep when it's down, or just accept it gets darker longer in the winter months and get more sunlight in the summer months (assuming you're in the Northern Hemisphere).

Stop mentally messing people up by changing clocks. People's bodies are very resilient, and will adapt accordingly. Heck we see that with babies all the time when trying to get them to sleep through the night. Besides technology exists enough now that this time change is not longer

God, yes, please.
I work with teams in the US, Ireland, India and China (Yeah, I'm in IT, how'd'ya guess?) and it's bad enough normally but particularly screwed up around Daylight/Summer Times changes. I would be thrilled if we just all got used to call it whatever the time was in Iceland (effectively UTC), no matter what time of day it is.

I work at a power company. I will also attest that DST doesn't reduce power consumption. DST is based on the obsolete premise that the use of electrical power is lighting. That hasn't been true for decades- perhaps a century.

It is widely misrepresented that Franklin proposed Daylight Savings Time. In fact, what he actually was proposing was a means to extract more work from people, or "Daylight Slavings Time". The "l" apparently was dropped in the transition to manuscript.

If you work odd hours, evening hours, early mornings, or outside all day, you probably don't get much benefit from DST. But if you work in an office, till 5:00, that extra hour of evening daylight provides a real benefit. Many activities, both work and leisure, are better enjoyed with daylight. Few who work regular office hours do these sorts of activities before work, so shifting that daylight to the hours after work is more beneficial.